Tomorrow Berlin (9 page)

For several weeks, the street has lost its old appeal. Its heart is frozen, its surface covered in snow. They shovel the snow up in some places, on the roads, in front of shops, which then turn to mud, leaving a thin layer that your shoes slip on.

No one panics; people here are used to putting on boots, taking a shovel to clear their doorways. It’s as though a parallel life is activated: bikes and tables outside cafés are put away, hats and tights are taken out, daylight becomes unfamiliar, there are invitations to people’s flats for soup or a cup of tea. The out-of-sync people change their rhythm, too; it’s dark at 4 p.m., so it’s best to try not to get up too late. But it’s a time of celebration, the clubs are never busier than at these times, when everyone is seeking a bit of warmth.

Armand has got used to this life. He feels like he belongs to this scene. For the first time in his life, he feels as though he knows where his generation is at. He can already picture himself telling his children about the adventures and mistakes of his youth. Because even if Armand is living it fully and could live no other way at this point,
he cannot imagine staying ten years, eventually dying beneath a glitter ball.

He doesn’t do drugs because he’s disgusted at life; it’s maybe more out of a love of life, since his sensations, his loves, his one-night stands, his joys and his pains are all so much more intense. It’s an adventure he’s instigated; it’s no less noble or real for that. The locations and the substances don’t matter, because those feelings are powerfully present within him.

That is the essential difference between Armand and Tobias; for Armand, these are extraordinary sensations and for Tobias they are normal.

Tobias had to leave Otto’s place. Five months is a long time to sleep on the same sofa. He moved in with Franz, at the apartment he’s been lent. They did a deal; Tobias pays the electricity and gets the second bedroom. It’s in Neukölln, the last Turkish district in the south of the city.

There’s this girl, Sarah, that Armand snogs every Sunday at the Panorama. He’s never had sex with her in the toilets – that’s not her style. Sarah
doesn’t do drugs. But she’s there every week, dancing with the rest of them. Sarah’s a graphic designer; just about everyone here is. She comes on her own, without friends or drugs; she just comes, since she feels at ease with herself.

This evening, Armand has arranged to meet Sarah for a drink, away from the Berghain, at Kottbusser Tor. He’s excited at the thought of seeing her, but a little anxious too. It feels a bit like he’s falling for her.

It’s the first time this has happened since he arrived; he sleeps with two, three, four, even five girls a week. He’s confident, everyone’s high, and it’s easy, direct, brutal sex in the toilet cubicles; standing up, unprotected, a few thrusts of the pelvis as an intermission between dances. The girl pulls her knickers up and they leave the toilets without kissing. Most of the time, he can hardly remember them; they are just hazy encounters with anonymous girls.

But this one’s different. He’s going to meet Sarah to have a drink and talk. Normally, he turns down this sort of invitation, he’s not keen on seeing them again, the Berghain girls; he’s gone down on them in the toilet cubicles, he’s taken them from behind, without restraint, and that’s quite enough. But this time something is
impelling him. Perhaps Sarah is the one after all.

They meet outside the underground. It’s snowing. Sarah isn’t that pretty to be honest; not that great a body either, not the sort he’d dream about. And yet he desires her more than any other, because every time they’ve kissed, there’s been electricity between them, a dark prickle of desire.

They kiss on the cheek like friends. They walk for a bit. Let’s go in here, this bar’s quite trendy.

They have a few beers. Armand tells some stories that make her laugh. He feels strong when he’s talking to her; she listens to him wide-eyed; Armand’s reflection sparkles at the edge of her pupils. When he runs out of things to say, he kisses her. He feels her melt, feels her body yielding to him entirely after a kiss.

They go to her place.

He begins undressing her on the stairs. They’re in a hurry. She’s laughing. Armand slips his hand up her skirt while she’s opening the door. He feels her little thighs tremble, her slit open. They throw themselves on the bed; they get rid of their clothes as best they can, kiss again, lick each other, or rather taste each other, and fuck, eagerly.

When he takes her, Armand understands why he wanted to see her again. She looks like his ex,
Emma, the only one he loved. That’s not apparent from her features or the shape of her breasts. No, it’s deeper than that. She has the same taste, her skin, her body has the same smell, the same flavour.

He realises this as he comes, violently, in Sarah.

The apartment seems spacious, but Tobias and Armand only ever see the crummy little kitchen. That’s where Fritz receives them.

Fritz is Swiss. He claims he’s an artist. He puts up the kind of installation you see everywhere, piles of wood or polystyrene.

They talk a bit to be polite, to try to make it a bit less uncivil, but all three of them know that that’s not why they’re there.

After a while, Fritz says what they’ve been waiting to hear: ‘How much do you want?’

Fritz supplies small nightclub dealers. His speed is strong; he sells at a ludicrous price, around three euros a gram, because he shifts it in quantity.

Tobias and Armand buy as much as they can; they spend all the money they have left. It won’t
be a wasted investment; speed sells fast in club toilets, and for more than three times what they paid.

When they go back to Armand’s place, it’s always the same routine; they divide up their treasure.

Armand enjoys this activity, filling the little bags with a gram – always a little less, business is business – using his electronic scales. The calculations are looking good. We spent sixty euros; we’ll earn 240 and three grams left over for us. It’s going to be a good weekend, yeah, it’s going to be a good one. Club tickets, juice, cigarettes and sandwiches, they can pay for the lot.

They put the speed in the fridge to keep it fresh. Yeah, it’s going to be a good one.

Juli is ten. She’s long understood what kind of a man her father is. She realises that she can never rely on him, that he can’t cope with other people any more than with himself.

Franz is elegant; something about his appearance would never make you suspect he leads the life he does. But Juli is too familiar with
his unwillingness to meet your eye, his look of shame, to be taken in. She knows that if he comes to see them – her and her mother, Juli and Martha Krüll, the pastor’s granddaughter and daughter – it’s because he’s hungry and has lost everything, because he always ends up losing everything.

When Franz knocks on the door, they know it’s him even before they open. The hours he keeps are like no one else’s, not the postman, not Mum’s friends.

Martha always gets a bit emotional when Franz visits. It doesn’t matter what state he’s in, she’s always glad to see him. And perhaps he’ll have changed, who knows? It’s been so long since he last came.

Juli doesn’t want to hear anything about him. She doesn’t want him to kiss her, to say that she’s got bigger, or call her his girl. She doesn’t want a loser for a father. She persists in not believing him. She knows that Mum will lend him money; she knows they won’t see him again for several weeks, until the next time. She has the impression of a swindle being committed against her. She doesn’t want him to ask her how things are at school. She can manage perfectly well without him. As soon as he’s around, there are complications. Mum says she has a migraine, she shuts herself away in her
room and cries; she takes her medicine to sleep, which makes her a different person. Everything was going fine, but he had to come back. After he’s been, the house, where she plays and laughs, becomes a temple of damaged nerves.

Today when Franz came, Juli, his own daughter, told him that she didn’t want to see him again. She gave him her savings – twenty-five euros – and asked him to go.

Tobias has invited Armand to dinner at his and Franz’s place.

It’s in a part of Neukölln that Armand doesn’t know, far to the south, a long way from Kreuzberg and the Turkish market. Although he looked at a map before he left, when he comes out of the S-Bahn, he gets lost. The avenues are big and lonely, devoid of people, streets that seem to have given up the ghost. No shops or pedestrians, just a few faded signs, and dirty snow as far as the eye can see.

Armand lights a cigarette, a reflex action, because he’s alone and cold, and doesn’t know which way to go. Choosing a direction at random
isn’t an easy task. These streets look nothing like the map; they are much less straight, much bigger, and impossible to follow with your index finger. It had seemed easy: left and then second right when you come out of the underground. But it turns out there are lots of underground exits. There are lots and Armand is lost.

There’s a guy over there. A guy crossing the road. Armand runs over to him. He’s a Turk; he speaks German but no English. At times like this, Armand feels very foreign, as though the whole city is reproaching him for not making enough of an effort. He stammers three sentences in German; he doesn’t know how to get to an address he’s been given. It’s not the first time he’s got lost, of course, but this time the feeling of anxiety has crept up on him; a sharp sensation catches his stomach, like when he arrived at holiday camp as a boy. He’d lost his bearings, he was no longer sure of who he was. He didn’t know where he’d sleep that night. It was strange, being away from home. He felt terribly alone.

The guy who was crossing the street shows him the way with a few gestures. And off Armand goes. It’s the right street; he’s there, he’s found Franz’s place.

Tobias and Franz are sitting in the kitchen. They’re peeling vegetables. On a corner of the table, a little bottle of GHB, a syringe and a big carafe of fizzy vitamins seem to be waiting for someone to pick them up. It makes a strange sight, this still life, the fresh vegetable peelings, as though still wet with morning dew, and the little drugs kit.

‘Come and sit down, Armand. Take that chair there. Fix yourself some juice, Loulou. You hungry?’

Since they have known each other, Tobias has been playing this role for Armand, looking after him, trying to give him what he thinks is best. He makes him sit down, get a bit high, then eat. These maternal concerns may be misplaced but they are terribly sincere. This is what he knows best, for the body and soul.

Armand does as he’s told. He has already mastered the routine. A mouthful of vitamins. The GHB goes into the syringe – 0.8 to start with, that’s not too bad. In his mouth he mixes it with the vitamins. He swallows it all and then has another drink to take the taste away. He has learned to recognise this taste; he would know it anywhere. He realises exactly what he’s doing, what substance he’s dealing with. It’s a drug he’s
familiar with now, since he’s taken it almost every day for several months. As an initiate, he has entered their little circle. When he thinks about it, Armand feels a little misplaced pride. He’s already known as G-star in the toilets at the Panorama. He’s proud he’s mastered how to use it. He believes he has chosen the road he’s on with his accidental companions.

So he had his fix almost as soon as he got to Franz’s, a fix that had his name on it – as though he had made it entirely himself. He’s playing the part of a drug addict as some people play the role of a café waiter: his changing appearance, the aesthetic of his pose, the cult of the formal, precise poetry of those who live for their pleasures, for unknown sensations. It’s a goal of existence, the lost search for narcotic pleasures. Are they not all seeking pleasure? What else is there to guide our lives? For Armand, it’s that simple, he has never before experienced such intense pleasure. Or maybe he did when he was in love with Emma. But he lost her. He’s trying something else, that’s all. There is no meaning. So live for what you love. At one point it was Emma, now it’s GHB. He’s throwing himself into it body and soul. The question for him is not whether it’s appropriate. It suits him; it’s as simple as that. Perhaps it’s temporary,
perhaps not. For the moment, it’s like playing the café waiter.

They had something to eat and then Astrid arrived. She’s a friend of Tobias’s and has come to cut their hair. That’s her job; she’s brought a little metal case with all her kit in it.

They talk and take drugs at the little kitchen table. There’s music. They have fun in a laid-back way.

Astrid is twenty-five. She works in a salon in the west, somewhere quite posh. She’s brunette, quite pretty, that sort of cute beauty that doesn’t hit you over the head; she has a way of looking at you, of moving and smiling, that makes her charming, almost touching. She has little red cheeks and bobbed hair; she’d know how to look after you, in a bed or in a chair, with tenderness and attention. Her skin probably doesn’t taste incredible, but she’s sweet for sure, certainly enough to take her seriously. Hers is not the sort of beauty that promises great adventures, but a sincere, agreeable life.

Franz watches her as she talks; she laughs at his jokes. He’d like to know her, to sample peace and the balm of simple affection. She likes cutting hair, she knows what she’s doing .

They get started. Franz goes and wets his hair,
and Tobias puts a chair in front of the mirror in the bedroom.

When she touches Franz’s head, she has a way of taking hold of locks of hair, in three fingers, from the roots to the tips, to gauge how long they are. It’s a graceful, professional gesture, of the utmost gentleness.

Franz, sitting in the chair, watches her in the mirror. She’s standing behind him, her eyes focused on his hair. From time to time, they exchange glances in the mirror; she gives a quick smile then gets back to work. It’s been a long time since anyone bothered about Franz like this, with attention and gentleness.

She’s doing him a favour, as a friend, though just a few hours before, they hadn’t met. She moves closer to him, leans her stomach against the chair, from time to time one of her breasts brushes against Franz’s head. It’s troublingly intimate, almost like a dance; him, sitting in front of the mirror and her, standing at his back. He can feel her breathing and almost nestling against him. He looks at her in the mirror and thinks she’s beautiful.

The haircut is over, they move apart. The locks of dead hair are strewn over the floor like privileged witnesses of this intimacy. Now it’s
Armand’s turn and then Tobias’s, but they won’t be suitors, they won’t dance with her. She’ll cut their hair and that’s all.

They stay in the apartment a while longer, floating to the rhythm of the music and the drugs, then happily set off for the Golden Gate, sporting their brand-new haircuts.